I have to use a cheatcode of noagp with DSL on my laptop. I decided tonight to see if I could do a hard drive install. One little thing caused trouble. After doing the install I couldn't find a way of passing to cheatcode to my kernal. Cant use a boot floppy as the laptop doesn't have a floppy. I did manage to add the "noagp" to the appent line of the lilo.conf file on the hard drive but couldn't figure out how to rewrite lilo afterwards as the computer hung during boot because it couldn't use the agp. Kind of like the chicken and the egg.

The way I finally resolved it was crashing the file system. That let me into a root command line while I was checking/repairing the system. I ran lilo and now the system works fine.

Surely there must be a simpler (more elegant) way to do this. Would one of you help?

This is the way (I believe) you do it.Boot from the DSL disk again. Mount the root partition for DSL. Im not entirely sure concerning the permissions, but as super user, ("sudo su"), you should be able to access /etc/lilo.conf on that partition. Now, look for a line saying "append='...'". If there is one, put a space at the end, then add "noagp". Otherwise, look for a line saying "root=/dec/hda1" or something similar, and after it add "append='noagp'". Now, you will need to run lilo on that again, but Im not sure how. Somebody should be able to help u here, but I think it is something like type "lilo -r" followed by the full path to that lilo.conf.

Thanks. I had everything figured out except the lilo -r option. Somehow I had missed seeing that -r in my Linux in a Nutshell book <slaps forehead>. Much better to do it this way than the way I did it.